Inexpensive and even free desktop, web-based and mobile movie editing suites let ordinary people commemorate and celebrate vacations, sports seasons, and anniversaries by setting their pictures and videos to music.
Amateur video slideshow producers generally add songs that convey some message or have particularly relevant lyrics. When creating video slideshows, users run into a recurring problem: Songs can often be too long for that format. Long songs make the overall video too long. Or users run out of content to fit the full length of a particular song.
To solve this problem, amateur video slideshow producers generally cut the song wherever convenient and fade out before fading into or starting a new song. This technique, while easy to do, generally produces an amateurish result. More skilled users, who are comfortable with audio editing software, can listen to a song to find sections of the song that sound similar or almost identical one another, find and study waveforms associated with these sections to splice out (e.g., delete) the section of music in between the two splice points. While this is likely within the skill of a professional audio engineer, it is generally beyond the abilities of all but the most skilled of amateurs. In addition, it requires both listening to a song to identify which portions of the song waveform should be studied, and studying the waveforms to identify matches—a process that takes a skilled audio engineer a significant amount of time.